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HOCKEYTALK.BIZ: HOCKEYTALK RADIO
WITH JOSH BREWSTER

TRANSCRIPT: PAUL KELLY INTERVIEW 1/16/10

The following is a transcript of Paul Kelly’s appearance on Hockeytalk Radio with Josh Brewster on Saturday, January 16, 2010.  The complete audio is available at the bottom of this page.

HOCKEYTALK (BREWSTER): At the end of August, it was quite a shockwave when it came to be that a vote was going to be taken by the player reps of the NHLPA and your job was on the line after just 22 months. I was wondering if you could tell me a little bit about the events that led up to that day in August because you're quite well-liked and this was a real shocker for a lot of people, especially to a lot of older hockey players, a real shocker that this was going to be a short tenure.

KELLY: I won’t be able to get into a lot of the details, obviously. I’m one of those guys who believes that a lot of what goes on in the locker room should stay in the locker room, and need not be discussed openly.

There were some structural issues within the players association just in terms of the way we were set up to operate. There were some other advisors—not players—but other people who had roles within the players association who obviously had a different approach to governing the union from my approach. My view is that particularly now under a salary cap system, that the people running the players association need to work hard to cooperate with the National Hockey League. To grow our sport, to create special [sound cuts out for two seconds] to generate certain revenues and to try to work as partners to the largest extent possible. We were never going to be true partners, but we certainly were joint venturers and we needed to behave as such. And so, I tried to work cooperatively with the league. Needless to say, some who were fairly hard-line union guys, including some who had been involved in prior administrations at the players association disagreed with my approach and started to generate some opposition.

You know, one of the unfortunate things about the event in August was that the vast majority of players didn't even know that it was happening or that it was a possibility. I would venture to guess that 95% of the players in the National Hockey League knew nothing about the circumstances until they saw it in the media after the fact, which is unfortunate. The second thing which is unfortunate is that we'd started to lay the groundwork for a lot of very positive things for the players.

We'd put together a good staff of people. We had some quality people like Glen Healy, Pat Flatley, two former NHL players who were working very hard on various initiatives. We had some outstanding business people and some financial people, and we'd already begun some discussions with the league about some of the collective bargaining issues and I was confident that we were going to be able to resolve those without any kind of an interruption in our sport, which certainly the NHL can't afford another one of those after just having had one back in 2004.

So, I think that in many respects the players themselves were victims of an unfortunate situation.

I certainly harbor no ill will whatsoever against any player and I still have very strong relationships with virtually all the players of the National Hockey League. I communicate with them on a regular basis both in person (and) by phone, text message, email and otherwise. I attend a number of games, particularly here in Boston.

It was an unfortunate and somewhat sad experience but I'm confident that the players association will be able to pull themselves together and right the ship.

HOCKEYTALK: Now, Paul, you have a small group of folks within the NHLPA at the time -- and I understand if there's things you can't get into -- but I have to wonder, the small group of folks, this includes Buzz Hargrove, the ombudsman, who took over for Eric Lindros, correct?

KELLY: Yes, he started as one of our advisory board members and stepped into the role of ombudsman, which was originally occupied by Eric, yes.

HOCKEYTALK: ...Was your relationship with Eric Lindros--and I remember when he was announced in that position--was your relationship with him always positive or did it take a turn at some point?

KELLY: It was positive at the outset. Eric was on the selection committee which selected me to be the new executive director back in the Fall of 2007. Eric and I, we didn't know each other prior to that experience.

I think we started off having a fairly sound relationship for a number of reasons, which I won't get into the details. Over the period of a period of six months or so some tension started to develop there and that became somewhat difficult, again, largely because of the structure we had in place...you know...which I won't bore the listeners with...something about corporate governance. But we had a fairly challenging set of circumstances that we were living by at the time.

HOCKEYTALK: Paul, I don't want to hit the hammer too hard on this, but are you at liberty to talk about a couple of the things that ... the ... how do I say this? The clouds of innuendo. You have one thing that comes out early...it says 'Paul Kelly,' there's a perception. Any time I see the word perception,' I know I'm going to be fed a shovel full of you-know-what. A perception that Paul was 'too cozy' with NHL brass, with Gary Bettman.

And my reaction, before you give me your reaction (laughs) is, how much acrimony does everyone need?

The sport just killed itself with a lockout. You've got a salary cap now, and everyone's making a bunch of dough. The minimum (salary) is about a half million dollars. So why wouldn't you want a decent enough, maybe an arm's length relationship, with Bettman, but why wouldn't you want a good relationship? It's not like you weren't on anybody's case here. You had a pension case that you had to try, right, during your tenure?

KELLY: Yes.

HOCKEYTALK: ...to help restore some justice to widows. What do (the players) need? Do they need acrimony? This is what I didn't get.

KELLY: One of the things I learned serving for the Department of Justice for ten years and being a prosecutor and trying an awful lot of cases, is that you can vigorously defend your client and take very tough positions on behalf of your client, and still at the end of the day, a long difficult day in the courtroom, still have a completely civil, professional and friendly relationship with your adversary, who in those instances was a defense lawyer of some kind. And it wouldn't be uncommon for me to go out and have a drink or a meal with an adversary after a long, difficult trial. I mean, it doesn't have to become a situation where you're constantly at odds and having a very personal, bitter, relationship. So, I would say that that's the relationship we had with the NHL.

I took very tough positions on behalf of the players. I certainly knew my mandate. The league knew what my mandate was. I did sue the league on behalf of the players, I did threaten to take certain actions if they (the league) didn't alter their positions from time to time. So, without getting into the details of my discussions with Mr. Bettman and Mr. Daly, I can tell you that it was not all fun and games.

On the other hand, I think we did manage to maintain a very healthy professional relationship, which, again, I believe you have to do in these positions. If you can't coexist, if you can't be in the same room with one another, then how are you ever going to work through difficult problems? How are you ever going to work together to grow the game to overcome some of the challenges in our sport? And so, I think there's a balance there to be struck and I think that we tried to find that balance.

There certainly were people within the players union--not players, but outside advisors--who distrusted everything about the league. Who believed that the league was always out to take actions which were not in the best interest of the players, that the league was not to be trusted and who wanted to have this constant battle with the league. Not unlike the relationship that existed during the Bob Goodenow era, leading up to the lockout.

Under the old CBA system, where it was not a salary cap, maybe there was some room where there could be an adversarial relationship, but certainly under a new cap system, where the only way that the players and the owners and the league do well, or when the fans, frankly, do well, is when the revenues are growing, when the sport is improving and getting more viewers and more fans and bringing in greater dollars and greater viewers and that can't happen if you're fighting with each other all the time.

So, for those people who number one, believe that I was "too cozy" with the league, I can tell you that they're sorely mistaken. For those who believe that I was kind of "too soft" and "too friendly," number one, they don't know the true facts. Number two, if anybody knows where the line is to be drawn between being too cozy and having an appropriate professional relationship I would suggest that it's me, only because I spent about five years of my life investigating and prosecuting Alan Eagleson for stepping over that line, and having a relationship with the management side and the owners of the NHL which was not conducive to his responsibilities to the players and ultimately led him into criminal conduct for which he ultimately pled guilty and went to prison.

In the position that I held, you're always going to have critics. You're always going to have people who envy the role and perhaps would like to have it themselves, and that's just a fact of life. I understood that when I took the job and I understood it all the way through. It's just unfortunate that the structure that we had allowed those people to gain enough momentum that they were able to convince a small group of players to vote the way they did at the end of August.

HOCKEYTALK: You know, to me, sitting here just reading tons and tons of news as it comes out, doing what I do for a living, the words "cheap manipulation" come to mind. Cheap manipulation. I see this business about "too cozy." You can say that about anybody..."too cozy" is the easiest thing and no one ever backs anything up with evidence. I understand that there were also--and you can hack away at any of this, Paul--there were issues of anonymous memos coming out, which makes things even fishier. Anonymous memos directed against you by people...

But, there's anonymous memos, and then they're saying, well (Kelly) may have seen reports that he wasn't meant to see. A lot of this was very fishy to a lot of us. Very fishy. Can you hack away at any of that?

KELLY: Again, I won't get into the details, I will only say that I am completely confident that every action that I took during my 22 months was designed to be in the best interest of the players. To advance the interests of the players, and not for any self-interested reason.

There was a situation where some players came to me in confidence and expressed a number of concerns--I won't get into who those players were or what their concerns were, following a meeting that we had in June in Las Vegas. Some players expressed concerns about something that had gone on during a closed meeting.

It was my judgment after discussing it with some people within the office, including some lawyers, that I had a duty and responsibility to determine what in fact went on there so that I could address these concerns that had been brought to my attention by these players.

I did look at some portion of minutes of a closed meeting which I did not attend. I did it for the sole reason of carrying through on this expression of concern from these players. I did it for the right reasons. Once I looked at the minutes, I saw that in fact the concerns from these players were genuine and well-founded.

I immediately brought this to the attention of the full executive board, that means the representatives, one from each of the 30 NHL teams, and I disclosed to them how this had come about, how players had brought it to my attention, the steps I took and what I discovered and I laid it out for them in some detail at a meeting.

Any notion that I took actions that were inappropriate or that I did it for an improper reason, I say is a bunch of bunk.

I did it for the right reasons, I did it for the players and frankly if I had not taken the steps that I opted to take I think I would have been shirking my responsibilities as the executive director.

Some of these are hard calls. They can be twisted and turned and described as other than what they actually were, and I don't have a whole lot of control over that. Unfortunately, in any high-profile business, particularly the sports world, you do have leaks. It's very difficult to keep information confidential when it's known by hundreds and hundreds of people. Not just players and staff, but agents and others. Once that information gets circulated, it gets distributed back to the media, sometimes anonymously. People that have an agenda, they twist it and they turn it and they pitch it in a certain form. So articles get written which aren't always entirely factual, but again, it comes with the territory.

It's a little bit of an unfortunate side of the business, but I'm a big boy, I understand all of that stuff.

You know, from my perspective, at this point, I want what is best for these players. I have told the players, look, I am willing to be helpful to in any manner that I can be helpful to them. I do believe that they have sufficient time to right the ship so that they can get themselves ready for the discussions with the league, which lie ahead here in terms of a new collective bargaining agreement, and other than that, I'm a guy who's forward-looking, not backward-looking. I'm a hockey person by nature and wanted to make sure that I stayed involved in the sport in a meaningful way and I think I've done that, but I will always have a very high degree of respect for the players association and for the players and anything that I can do to advance their cause I'm perfectly willing and happy to do.

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